US jury convicts defendant Riley June Williams on six counts however is break up on whether or not she stole Nancy Pelosi’s laptop computer.
A Pennsylvania girl accused of storming the USA Capitol on January 6, 2021, has been convicted on six federal counts, together with civil dysfunction, theft of presidency property and assaulting the police.
However on Monday, the jury deciding Riley June Williams’ case couldn’t attain an unanimous verdict on two additional costs, together with whether or not she stole a laptop computer from the workplace of Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
US District Choose Amy Berman Jackson ordered Williams, of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, be taken into custody after the jury delivered its verdict.
Williams is amongst an estimated 900 defendants arrested in connection to the Capitol assault, which befell because the US Congress was certifying Joe Biden as winner of the 2020 presidential election.
The assault got here within the wake of then-President Donald Trump’s “Cease the Steal” rally, the place Trump falsely claimed to have gained the election “by a landslide”.
Williams attended the rally wearing a T-shirt that learn, “I’m with groyper,” a reference to a loose-knit group of white supremacists who align themselves with Nick Fuentes, a proponent of the “America First” motion.
She then joined hundreds of rioters who entered the Capitol constructing, forcing lawmakers to evacuate.
Movies from that day present Williams directing different rioters to “push, push, push” in opposition to federal regulation enforcement as they tried to clear the Capitol Rotunda. She additionally pointed rioters in the direction of a staircase that results in Pelosi’s workplace.
In a June court docket submitting, prosecutors depicted Williams as being “among the many entrance line of rioters”, serving as a pacesetter to others.
“She engaged in repeated purposeful bodily clashes and verbal altercations with federal regulation enforcement officers and instructed others to do the identical,” prosecutors wrote.
One other video, posted to Williams’s social media, exhibits what seems to be the theft of a Hewlett-Packard laptop computer from Pelosi’s workplace. A voice that prosecutors determine as Williams might be heard saying, “Dude, placed on gloves,” earlier than a pair of gloved arms seize the pc.
Williams later boasted on social media that she took Pelosi’s gavel and laborious drives. “To this point, neither the laptop computer nor the gavel has been recovered,” prosecutors mentioned.
Within the days following the Capitol assault, a witness known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation with info that Williams “meant to ship the pc system to a good friend in Russia, who then deliberate to promote the system to SVR, Russia’s international intelligence service”.
Williams denies the allegations, claiming they had been “made-up” by an ex-boyfriend.
Throughout her trial, prosecutors linked Williams to an extremist philosophy known as “accelerationism”, which views Western governments as corrupt and makes an attempt to speed up their demise.
“She not solely particularly sought to dam Congress from certifying the Electoral Faculty vote, but in addition to undermine and hinder the federal government extra usually,” prosecutors wrote in court docket filings.